Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

Pirate Kiosk, pirating the Internet in off-line mode

As the availability of copyrighted files online increases exponentially worldwide, artists and hackers are finding ways of distributing and making this data available without intentionally breaking international copyright laws. The “Pirate Kiosk“, based at the Sophienstiftsplatz in Weimar, Germany, attempts to make a copy of the famous torrent tracker site, “The Pirate Bay”, but keeps the entire listing on a closed, local network that is not accessible through the Internet but only to those people within its immediate vicinity by typing in “http://kioskofpiracy.org” into their browsers. The idea is an attempt to ground an Internet landmark (such as the notorious Pirate Bay) to a specific physical location, so that only those within its local neighboorhood can gain access to its content. The project’s aim is to show how the Internet exists as neither a machine or controllable unit, but rather as a “system of agreements which can work in any circumstances.” The project also includes a detailed “How-To” which instructs users on three steps necessary to build their own “Pirate Kiosk”. These steps include 1.) Gathering a database dump of The Pirate Bay and all of the torrent files hosted there, 2.) Finding suitable tracker software and 3.) Setting up a website to make the files available. Overall the project is a testament to the fact that file sharing has gone beyond its initial development as an Internet-based delivery system into a practice that adds increased meaning to the files being shared and gains importance as a social leveler in the already controlled and regulated realm of public networks and other social platforms.